CNBC: Stock futures slid early Thursday morning amid worse-than-expected jobless claims, while investors continued to rotate out of high-flying tech stocks.
Futures contracts tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked lower by 150 points. S&P 500 futures fell 0.5%. Nasdaq 100 futures fell 0.8%.
First-time filings for unemployment insurance totaled 861,000 last week, the highest level in a month and above the Dow Jones estimate of 773,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
Zero Hedge: After Australia’s government this week announced its intent to issue legislative changes known as the “News Media Bargaining Code” by the end of this month, Facebook in retaliation has said it will begin restricting news sharing on its platform in Australia.
It comes a day after the current session of parliament vowed to implement the law by the session’s close, which ends on Feb. 25. The code seeks to force major US-based internet companies to fairly pay local Australian publishers for use of their content. Last month Google threatened to remove its search engine from Australia altogether over the legislation, with Facebook backing Google’s pressure campaign.
In response to Australia’s proposed new Media Bargaining law, Facebook will restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content.
The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter.
Essentially Aussies will now be barred from posting, sharing or event viewing news content on Facebook whatsoever in a move which Google may soon replicate.
PK Media: Wednesday morning more than 1.3 million electric power customers across Texas remain without power during the coldest winter storm in decades. Gov. Greg Abbott put all of Texas’ 254 counties under a disaster declaration as the state has been hammered with a series of major and historic winter storms. The reasons for the collapse of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid are still being debated, and it’s certain that there is more than one cause and more information will come out.
But one of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.
Facebook announced that it will now debunk common myths about climate change, further leaning into the arbiter of truth role that the company once renounced.
The company said it plans to rely on experts from George Mason University, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the University of Cambridge to identify and debunk climate change myths.
Facebook has introduced these information hubs and relied on them as a key part of its tactic to combat the widespread problem of misinformation on its services despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg in May saying he did not think “Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth.” Read More
Breitbart: Palestinian schools run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees — to which the Biden administration has promised to restore funding — still teach inciteful content against Israel. Lessons include condemning its recent peace agreements with Arab countries, erasing Israel from all maps and glorifying terrorism, a new report by an Israeli watchdog showed.
In January, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), an Israeli watchdog that analyzes Palestinian textbooks, found that the new textbooks produced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were “rife with problematic content that contradicts stated UN values.”
Children were given mathematics problems using martyrs from the First Intifada to formulate equations, told to “defend the motherland with blood,” and told the lie that Israel dumps radioactive and toxic waste on purpose in the West Bank in order to harm Palestinians.
UNRWA, which serves millions of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, promised that the issue had been resolved and that the material in question had not been in use since November.
However, on Wednesday, the watchdog released a new report showing that school material distributed after November continued to glorify violence.
Arab News: Palestinian eligible voters have registered for May legislative and July presidential elections, the first in 15 years, the electoral commission in Ramallah said Wednesday.
The high rate reflects “awareness of citizenship rights and people’s thirst for the ballot box,” Palestinian Civil Affairs Minister Hussein Al-Sheikh wrote on Twitter.
More than 2.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, a territory occupied by Israel since 1967, and two million people live in the Gaza Strip, an enclave ruled by the Islamist group Hamas.
Of these, more than 2.6 million, or 93.3 percent of Palestinian eligible voters, had registered by the deadline late Tuesday, said commission spokesman Farid Taamallah.
“We are proud of this result,” he said, adding that the registration rate for the last legislative elections in 2006 was 80 percent.
The last Palestinian presidential election in 2005 led to the victory of the secular Fatah party’s Mahmoud Abbas. Read More
Zero Hedge: Conservative radio icon Rush Limbaugh has died at the age of 70 following a battle with lung cancer, his wife Kathryn announced on his radio show.
Limbaugh was diagnosed with stave IV lung cancer in January 2020. Days later, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union Address – America’s highest civilian honor – which former First Lady Melania Trump presented to him.
The days of our lives are seventy years; And if by reason of strength they are eighty years, Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow; For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10
Zero Hedge: One month ago, Saudi Arabia shocked the world when it announced that it would unilaterally cut 1 million barrels a day of crude production starting next month in an effort to boost prices. The plan worked – perhaps too well – and quickly pushed Brent crude well above $60, or the price level where as we reported over the weekend US shale production tends to aggressively return production and where OPEC traditionally tries to keep prices from surging too high.
As a result, on Sunday we noted that “oil prices have reached a critical threshold where OPEC+ must decide whether to increase production, or risk losing market share again to U.S. shale producers.”
Fast forward just a few days later when “the decision” appears to have been made, because as WSJ reports, Saudi Arabia plans to increase oil output in the coming months, reversing January’s big production cut and adding as much as 1 million barrels of oil. Read More
Israel 365: A report submitted to the United Nations Security Council revealed that North Korea and Iran have resumed cooperating on their missile programs which include developing nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“This resumed cooperation is said to have included the transfer of critical parts, with the most recent shipment associated with this relationship taking place in 2020,” the report stated, noting that North Korea “maintained and developed its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.”
“It produced fissile material, maintained nuclear facilities, and upgraded its ballistic missile infrastructure. It continued to seek material and technology for these programs from overseas,” the expert report states.
Fissile material is an essential ingredient for producing nuclear weapons.
“It displayed new short-range, medium-range, submarine-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile systems at military parades,” the experts said. Read More
TNA: As with a suspicious halt of a legal investigation, it’s generally true that those stifling scientific inquiry fear what such may uncover. This appears the case with Sexual Devolution (LGBT) activists who are now trying to ban research into so-called transgenderism.
It wasn’t always this way. Sexual devolutionaries once encouraged such science in the belief that uncovering an innate basis for “gender dysphoria” (GD) — the sense that you’re “stuck” in the body of the wrong sex — would legitimize the Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS or “transgender”) agenda. The idea is that “you can’t question how someone was born.” (Actually, you can. Asserting otherwise is the dangerous mistake of biological determinism.)
But this has recently and radically changed. While researching GD might “greatly benefit medical personnel in helping effectively treat transgender patients,” as the Federalist puts it, sexual devolutionaries have now become the three “hear, see, and speak no evil” monkeys on the issue. Read More
